August 26 – 30 What is a writer to do, wonders guest Laura Dattaro, when she realizes that all the members of JPL’s Curiosity team are, every single one of them, women? Point it out? Pretend she’s not surprised? Shrug, because why not? A young immigrant woman gets sick of her work conditions, enlists the […]
Month: August 2013
The first tips of yellow leaves are showing among aspens and cottonwoods in western Colorado. Summer, though still plenty warm, is beginning to turn. You think about what inevitably comes, leaves dropping, opening the stage for snow and ice. You imagine what it will be like to hear the crunch of it every time you […]
My beloved neighbor Joanne was 87 years old when her son found her dead in the hallway of her old farmhouse on Monday. They’d gone to a funeral together that morning — a younger relative had died of pancreatic cancer — and after lunch he’d dropped her off at home. When he returned later that […]
This summer, I became slightly obsessed with the Ring. Not the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, not the Japanese horror movie (which I have vowed never to see), but the epic four-opera series by Richard Wagner. Der Ring des Nibelungen spans about 17 hours and features a cast of gods, dwarves, giants, mermaids, and a dragon, all […]
In 1908, a young Lithuanian immigrant named Pauline Newman got a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, then one of New York City’s biggest garment factories. She worked as a “cleaner,” trimming threads off the new clothes and boxing them for shipment. It was dull, tiring work, with bullying bosses who forced the workers to […]
The first week in August was a big one for feminist Mars news (if I could design a beat…). August 6 marked the one-year anniversary of the Curiosity rover’s landing, and to celebrate, Mattel revealed Barbie’s 2013 Career of the Year: Mars Explorer. Mars Explorer Barbie (available in both caucasian and African-American varieties), with her shiny, […]
August 19 – 23 This week, Ann told the complicated history of two gods of physics. An app that fights cancer? Why, yes: by boosting your positive thinking! Christie promptly took out her Science Machete and chopped the press release’s head off. Cassie wondered if we should be so gung ho to kill “invasive species” […]
Last weekend I heard a story I won’t soon forget. Bob Freer, who runs an animal rescue shelter in the Everglades, appeared on a rerun of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and he began to talk about Florida’s python problem. Of course, I knew Florida had a python problem. But there’s knowing, and then there’s […]
